Nor hearts that fail, can utterly deflower
This grassy floor of sacramental power
Where we now stand communicants."

Tintern Abbey is two hundred and twenty-eight feet long. It had no
triforium, and the clerestory windows are rather large. The great east
window was even more elaborate than the western, but all of it has
fallen excepting the central mullion and the stronger portion of the
tracery which branches out on either side from it. There yet remain in
the building a few tiles with heraldic emblems, some broken monuments,
and some heaps of choice carvings, shattered as they fell, but
afterwards collected and piled against the walls. The Duke of Beaufort,
to whose estate it belongs, has done everything possible to arrest
decay, and all is kept in perfect order. A door leads out of the
southern transept to a few fragments of buildings in the fields on that
side, but most of the convent was on the northern side, where its ruins
surround a grass-grown quadrangle. A cloister once ran around it; on the
eastern side is the chapter-house, with the dormitory above, and on the
western side the remains of the abbot's lodgings and the guest-chambers
have been converted into cottages. The refectory and guest-hall are to
the northward, with ruins of the octagonal columns that supported the
roof. Such is this magnificent relic of the Cistercians, and yet it is
but one of seventy-six abbeys that they possessed before Henry VIII.
dissolved them. From the high-road down the valley of the Wye, which
skirts the green meadows along its southern face, is the best view of
the abbey, and the ruddy gray stone ruins, with the grassy fields and
the background of wooded hills beyond the broad river, make up a picture
that cannot easily be forgotten. Yet Tintern is most beautiful of all
when the full moon rising over the eastern hills pours a flood of light
through the broken east window to the place where once stood the high
altar.

The valley of the Wye again broadens, and the river flows in graceful
curves through the meadows, guarded on either hand by cliffs and woods.
The river is here a tidal-stream, having a rise of twelve feet, so that
it is now a strong current, flowing full and swift between grassy banks,
and anon is a shrunken creek, fringed by broad borders of mud. The
railway on the eastern bank runs over the meadows and through occasional
tunnels in the spurs of the cliffs. The high-road climbs the hill on the
western bank,